Advent calendar - December 22.

As mentioned yesterday, today comes a tutorial on how to do a winter landscape, but with drawing instead of editing! This is the method I usually go with, and the reason why is explained further down!

Step one: take a picture from SSO, preferably without trees or only pine trees

Step two: adjust the colors by desaturating the warm tones, and to get a more brownish/washed out green tone

Step three: add bare trees (provided as an attachment). This is the reason I like this method better than editing, because when you edit, the trees from SSO still has leaves on them, and that isn't very winter-like. Keep the trees on a separate layer until you're finished

Step four: use a brush, whatever you prefer (I use a frost brush from my winter pack) and add some snow on the branches on the bare trees. To make the process easier, I select the trees when I draw the snow. Don't use plain white for snow, use a very bright, grayish blue color

I only add snow on the thickest branches, and my brush is set on 100% opacity.

Step five: add snow on the ground. Here you can use the snow on ground brush I provided for you previously in December, on 80% opacity. If your programs allow it, use color dynamics on the ground snow (color dynamics is a setting where the brush uses two colors at once). Set one color to bright grayish blue, and the other to a darker grayish blue. Start with adding snow in the further back, and work your way up to the front. The closer you get to the "camera" the bigger should the brush be.
If you want less snow, the brush called "snow on ground1" from my winter pack is great for that purpose

Keep in mind that I now work on a layer underneath the bare trees.

And now, with a pretty big brush, I work on a layer over of the bare trees.

Step six: unless it's snow that has fallen a while ago, there should be some snow on the pine trees as well. Here I use a brush called "snow on trees" from my winter pack, and just add it randomly on the pine trees, but not too random, you can see a direction and pattern on how I add it, I simply just follow the "pine needles" direction. This brush works best if you're planning on blurring the background or if the trees is pretty far away, cause it doesn't look very good up close.
Here I work on a layer that's over the base layer, and underneath everything else.

Step seven: now just do your regular editing. In this step I have merged the layers and blurred the background. And afterwards you're done, unless you want to add falling snow of course

From summer to winter, in seven easy steps, hope it helped!

Hugs from Cath ❤